With the continuous development of the network technology, there have been more and more demands on network planning and management. Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology, a new technology, is aimed at providing a new layer of network architecture in the existing internet and publishing the content in the network to a network edge which is closest to a user terminal. With this technology, the user terminal is able to acquire the desired content nearby. Thus, the issue of network congestion can be addressed and the access speed of the user terminal may be enhanced.
There are several conventional dispatching methods using CDN technology. For instance, a dispatching method based on IP address information of the user terminal and a method based on domain name resolution were proposed, where a commonly used one is the dispatching method based on IP address information of the user terminal.
With respect to the conventional method based on IP address information of the user terminal, a dispatching policy needs to be pre-configured in the CDN system. Generally, IP/Mask approach is adopted for the IP address information of the user terminal. In a CDN system, IP address or address segment of the user terminal is configured at a CDN node closest to the user terminal. Specifically, when the CDN system receives a request from the user terminal, the CND system searches, based on the IP address information of the user terminal, for the node close to the IP address and then dispatches the request to the node. For instance, in the CDN network covering Guangdong province, the dispatching policy can be pre-configured so that 218.19.0.0/16 is associated with CDN Guangzhou node and 219.133.0.0/16 is associated with CDN Shenzhen node. When the request from the user terminal whose IP address is 218.19.1.10 reaches the CDN system, the CDN system finds out that this IP address belongs to 218.19.0.0/16 which corresponds to CDN Guangzhou node. Thus, CDN Guangzhou node is assigned as a serving node to provide service for the user terminal.
During researching and practicing of conventional art, the inventor of the present invention discovers that the conventional art encounters below problems.
The conventional dispatching method based on IP address information of the user terminal is applicable to the CDN network where the IP address information of the user terminal is bonded with the area where the user terminal locates. However, in the networks of some operators, the IP addresses of the user terminals are all assigned dynamically, thereby making it impossible to distinguish the geographic locations of the user terminals using the IP address information. In this case, such dispatching method is no longer feasible. Therefore, the applicability of the conventional dispatching method needs to be improved.